Barry Gaberman

Lessons from five pooled philanthropic funds hold clues for sustaining civil society in the years ahead In 2017, we launched an initiative to examine the legacy and impact of a series of philanthropic investments established …

It was about 20 years ago that Caroline Hartnell came to my office at the Ford Foundation. She was trying to garner resources for a new quarterly publication called Alliance. I was to find out …

Alliance will be changing to having a greater mix of columnists with the next issue so this will be my last piece under the old regime. Given that it is the last piece, it seems …

Ever since it became clear that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States, there has been an unprecedented euphoria among civil society and philanthropy practitioners. Not since these practitioners began to …

My article in the last issue of Alliance was primarily targeted at making the case for perpetuity as one legitimate model for organized philanthropy. Having a robust number of models is important if you agree …

Whenever there is an economic downturn, or whenever a major problem catches the fancy of a critical mass of people, a cry goes up that the foundation world must do something to address the issue. …

Everyone loves to moan about a crisis, in this case an economic one. The words meltdown and tsunami are frequently used to describe the current situation. We are prone to take the most dire situation …

For the past two years I have been assisting the Global Fund for Community Foundations to consider whether it should establish itself as a free-standing entity. One of the more interesting aspects of this involvement …

From 4 to 7 May, over 3,000 people gathered in the greater Washington DC area in what I am told was the largest assembly on philanthropy in history. Some 80 plus concurrent sessions, 11 site …

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there was in the United States a philanthropic explosion. Vast sums of private wealth were directed to the establishment of private …